I get all my work from word of mouth. Do I need a website?

Word of mouth is the best lead source there is. That is not a polite opener before the pitch. A referral arrives pre sold, it costs nothing, it closes faster, it haggles less, and it comes from somebody who has already decided you are worth recommending. No advertising any of us could sell you performs like it.

So if that is where your work comes from, you are not doing it wrong, and the honest question is narrower than the one you usually get asked. Not “do you need to be online”. Just: what happens between somebody being told your name and that person ringing you.

What happens after your name is passed on

It goes roughly like this.

A builder tells a homeowner to use you. Or a neighbour over the fence says you did their driveway and you were decent. Your name gets written on the back of an envelope, or typed into a phone while the two of them are still standing there.

Then, almost always, the next thing that happens is a search. Your name, or your name and the trade, or your name and the town. Not because they doubt the recommendation, but because that is simply what everybody does now, in the same reflex way we check the weather.

What comes back is the bit worth thinking about, because it is not nothing. It is usually one of these:

• A directory listing you have never seen, with hours that may be wrong and a photograph you did not choose.
• A Facebook page last posted to in 2021, which reads as a business that may or may not still be running.
• Somebody else entirely. Another firm with a similar name, in a town forty minutes away, who is now in front of the customer who was looking for you.
• Reviews on a site you do not control, which may be three glowing ones from 2019 and one bad one from last March.
• Nothing at all, which is not neutral. It reads as either very new or very small, and the person has no way to tell which.

The referral still mostly survives this. Most people ring anyway. But some fraction do not, and you never find out which ones, because a call that does not happen leaves no trace. That is the entire argument for a website in a word of mouth business: not finding new customers, but keeping the ones you were already sent.

The builder problem

If you work for builders, property managers or general contractors rather than homeowners, there is a second thing going on.

Some of them will not add a sub to their list without something to check. Not because they are sniffy about it, but because they have a process: somebody in the office needs a business name, an address, a license number and proof of insurance, and they need to put it in a file. If checking you takes three phone calls, you are competing with a sub whose details took thirty seconds to find.

This is not every builder, and the ones you already work for clearly manage fine. It matters when you want the next one, and especially when somebody else recommends you to a company that has never used you.

When the answer is genuinely no

Here is the part most agencies will not write down.

If you are at capacity, hiring nobody, and not taking new customers, you do not need a website. Not this year. Your diary is full, the referrals keep coming, and a website would be a thing you paid for and then ignored. Spend the money on a better van, or do not spend it.

If you are three years from retiring and winding down deliberately, same answer. A website is a five year asset. It does not pay back inside a planned exit.

If you are a sub who works for exactly two builders and both of them are busy, your risk is not marketing. It is that two customers are your whole business. A website does not fix that. Getting a third builder does, and that happens on the phone, not on the internet.

If you cannot answer the phone, fix that first. The most expensive thing in any trade business is the call that rings out at eleven on a Tuesday. A website sends you more of those calls. If they are already going unanswered, you are paying to miss more of them.

We would rather say all that plainly than take $249 from somebody it will do nothing for.

When the answer is yes

The flip side, equally plainly. A website earns its keep when any of these are true:

• You want to grow, or you have just taken somebody on. A second van has to be fed, and word of mouth grows at its own pace rather than yours.
• You want different work than you get. Referrals bring you more of what you already did. If you have been doing small repairs and want full installations, the referral chain will keep sending repairs. A site is how you say what you actually want to be hired for.
• You are quoting against firms the customer can look up and you cannot be. This is the one that actually loses jobs, and it happens most on larger domestic work where the homeowner is comparing three names on paper.
• Your trade gets searched in an emergency. Roofs, water, power, blocked drains. People do not ask a neighbour at eleven at night, they search, and they ring the first outfit that looks real and answers.
• You rely on one or two sources of work. A website is not a replacement for them. It is the beginning of a second source that does not depend on one person remembering you.

What the minimum useful version looks like

If the answer is yes, the thing you need is much smaller than what you will be sold.

Four pages does it:

1. A home page that says what you do, where you work, and gives your phone number in text big enough to tap.
2. A services page that lists the jobs you actually want, in the words customers use. Not “residential and commercial solutions”. Panel upgrades. Driveways. Water heaters.
3. A page that proves you are real: license number, insurance, how long you have been going, the towns you cover, and a few photographs of your own work. Not stock photographs. Yours, on a phone, in daylight.
4. A contact page with the phone number again, your hours, and an address or at least a service area.

That is it. No blog you will never write. No gallery of 200 images that takes nine seconds to load. No chat widget pretending somebody is sitting there.

The three things that actually matter about it: it loads in a second on a phone on bad signal, the phone number is tappable on every page, and it says where you work. Most sites in the trades fail on at least one.

What it should cost

This is where people get hurt, so it is worth being blunt. A site like the one above is not a big job. If somebody quotes you four thousand dollars for four pages and a contact form, they are either doing far more than you need or charging for an office you are not using.

Our own version is $249 to build, up to eight pages, then $199 for the first year to keep it hosted, backed up and online, and $399 a year after that. We publish that figure because what a website costs is the question this trade is worst at answering honestly.

You can also do it yourself, and for some people that is the right call. We wrote a guide to the tools we would actually use if you were building it without us, and how to build and host one for free, including what free really costs you in time.

The one thing to do if you do nothing else

If you take only one thing from this: go and search your own business name on your phone, the way a customer would, from somewhere that is not your office.

Whatever comes back is what the referral sees. If that is a 2021 Facebook page and a wrong phone number, fix the phone number today and worry about the website later. If it is nothing at all, now you know what the person who was sent to you is looking at.

Then, if it is worth it, read how people actually find you nearby, because for most trades the map result does more work than the website does, and it is free.